Understanding the Graduate Job Market
outlook and graduate recruitment is likely to be largely unchanged for the second consecutive year. A fifth of employers are planning to hire more graduates in 2025, two fifths expect to match their previous intake, but over a third of organisations are likely to recruit fewer university-leavers over the coming year. In 2023, accounting & professional services firms featured in the Top 100 recruited an unprecedented number of university-leavers – a total of more than 7,000 trainees. And although recruitment in the past year has been lower, the sector will again be the largest recruiter of new graduates in 2025, with over 6,500 roles on offer. Graduate vacancies in the public sector are expected to increase for the fourth consecutive year, with more than 4,200 entry level opportunities available. And after a sharp rise in recruitment at engineering & industrial companies in 2024, these employers are set to cut their graduate intake in 2025 by a fifth. After a small rise in vacancies in 2024, there are expected to be fewer graduate roles at the City’s investment banks and fund managers in 2025 and employers elsewhere in the banking and finance sector also expect to cut their recruitment.
by employers featured in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers in 2020 was 12 per cent lower than in 2019. Recruitment began to bounce back in 2021 with a substantial 9.4 per cent rise in entry-level vacancies – the ‘V-shaped’ pandemic recovery in the graduate job market largely mirroring the recovery in the wider economy. This strong growth gathered pace the following year when graduate vacancies increased in all fifteen industries and business sectors represented in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers . In all, the number of graduate jobs available jumped by 14.5 per cent in 2022, the largest-ever year- on-year rise in graduate recruitment at the UK’s leading employers. Over the past twelve months, recruitment has been stable, with a modest 1.5 per cent increase in graduate vacancies, and at the start of the new 2024-2025 recruitment season, employers in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers are predicting that they will have a total of 26,043 graduate vacancies for autumn 2025 start dates. This is a slight reduction in the number graduates recruited in 2024 – an annual decrease of 1.1 per cent – and suggests that employers have a cautious
How Graduate Vacancies have Changed 2000-2025
p 14.5%
p 1.5%
p 6.2%
p 4.3%
q 1.1%
p 1.6%
q 6.3%
p 10.1%
p 7.9%
p 9.4%
p 10.8%
p 2.5%
p 3.3%
q 4.9%
p 12.6%
p 14.6%
p 10.9%
q 12.3%
q 6.7%
p 2.8%
q 0.8%
p 0.5%
q 6.5%
q 17.8%
q 8.3%
p 15.0%
2000
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
2025 2023 2024
Source High Fliers Research
TOP 100 GRADUATE EMPLOYERS 27
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